Management entities within communications networks periodically request updated discoverable information from devices within those communications network because communications networks and the devices within communications networks typically change dynamically during operation. For example, communications networks and devices within communications networks change dynamically due to, for example, failure of devices or device components, addition or removal of devices or device components, reconfiguration or re-provisioning of the devices or communications networks, and/or other changes within the communications networks. Thus, discoverable information about those devices and communications networks is updated at management entities to improve coherency between the data sets representing the discoverable information at the devices and at the management entities.
Known management entities typically poll or request updated discoverable information from the devices based on a schedule that specifies the times at which the management entity should request updates. For example, a schedule can specify that updates be requested at a fixed time each day, each week, hourly, or at other times. Thus, the management entity requests updated information from the devices that have previously been discovered within the communications network.
Such known data update mechanisms or processes, however, frequently fail to adequately maintain data coherency. For example, due to maintenance, failures, and/or outages within a communications network, one or more devices can be unreachable when a management entity requests the updated information. As another example, if the management entity attempts to request updated information at a time of high network usage or congestion, the requests for updated information can be lost, ignored, or suffer from timeout conditions. More specifically, for example, periods of network congestion can be caused when a system administrator schedules a management entity to request updates for many data sets at a common time. That is, requests for updated information can be lost, ignored, or suffer from timeout conditions at times when a processing or network load at a management entity is high due to many requests scheduled at a common time rather than the requests being well-distributed during a period of time.
Due to such failures, some devices do not (or are unable to) provide updated information to the management entity and the data at the management entity becomes stale or loses coherency. Furthermore, although systems administrators typically can manually generate new requests for the updated discovery information or can manually alter the schedule to avoid network congestion or outages, such manual intervention is costly and tedious. Additionally, because management entities determine that a request for updated information failed only after a scheduled request fails, the discoverable information at the management entities becomes stale because the deadline for that data has already passed. As a result system administrators are often unable to efficiently manage updating discoverable information from devices within a communications network.